It's a historical fact, that soldiers gave monickers for own and enemy tanks. Also I find it very inconvenient to say "Em-four-A-three-Ee-two" in a conversation with a friend, but have "in-house" names only for a few (see the list bellow).
I hope you will find some of them usefull, funny or both. And feel free to post your own, I'll edit them in

Ferdiand is Ferdinand, T-50-2 is T52, E-75 is Tiger-II-nowait, M4A3E2 is Jumbo, M4A3E8 is E8 and T95 is Turtle...

There are actually no strange ways me and the people I play with name the tanks to be quite frank. We give our own tanks "proper" names, but thats about it. In other names where the names of the enemies are not so clearly defined from before we'll often make up names for them, but in WoT I feel it only serves to create confusion =p. If something has a kind of dificult name we'll give it names also, Men of War is an example where one particular vehicle is known as "a thing" and another vehicle of similar design is "another thing".

I tend to refer to the Chaffee as "Coffee".
...mmmmmm, coffee... /Homer

In my native language I tend to refer to the T95 as "flatfish of Death", though that loses something in translation I'm afraid...

Apparently in some circles the S-51 is referred to as "Basilisk", after a WH40K artillery piece of roughly similar outline.

Historically Finnish troops nicknamed the T-28 "mail wagon" (Fin. postivaunu, ie. stagecoach) for unclear reasons (one theory goes it was thought to resemble said vehicles in Western movies popular in the period), T-34 "goldeneye" (Fin. sotka) as in the waterfowl which its silhouette rather resembles, and KV's were apparently - and rather boringly - referred to as "Klimis" for short.

AFAIK the "Mickey Mouse" nickname originally referred to BT-7s with the twin-hatch turret, but I don't see why it wouldn't have later been recycled for T-34s with similar setups.